Is America Growing Less Tolerant on L.G.B.T.Q. Rights?

Donald Trump at a campaign rally in October 2016 in Colorado.Credit
Evan Vucci/Associated Press

When my sister came out, there was an accordion trio on hand to perform the music of Sly and the Family Stone. Debutantes in white dresses and boys with matching cummberbunds and bowties drank from the waters of a gurgling champagne fountain. The entire affair, staged in my parents’ old house in Devon, Pa., was an anachronism, to be sure — but as wingdings go, it was tons of fun. It was 1975.

When I came out, in 2002, there wasn’t any party. There were tense meetings with the affirmative action/equal opportunity officer at my place of work; there was a carefully worded statement sent to my colleagues explaining exactly what “transgender” was; there was a series of conversations with my friends, and my mother, and the people whom I loved best, many of whom — in spite of their brave pledges to stand by me — ended those conversations in tears.

That was then.

People who “come out” at debutante parties have been off my radar for a long time now, although apparently they’re still going strong in some quarters. As for L.G.B.T.Q. people, “coming out” has gotten safer in fits and starts, not only in the wake of the Obergefell decision but also in other ways: L.G.B.T.Q. people are now visible in a way that was inconceivable half a generation ago. Most of the people that I thought I had lost after my 2002 unveiling have, miraculously, been returned to me, the intervening years having brought not only forgiveness but also understanding. Since my coming out, our family has thrived, and in the wake of that progress, I have believed that just as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. predicted, the arc of the moral universe does indeed bend toward justice.

Until now.

Last week, GLAAD — the media advocacy group for L.G.B.T.Q. people (of which I was a national co-chairwoman from 2013 to 2017) — released the results of its latest “Accelerating Acceptance” survey at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. While the biggest headlines from the forum focused on the fact that the president of the United States managed to get through an event on the world stage without shoving any prime ministers or calling anyone’s country an outhouse, the results of the poll, conducted by Harris, deserve attention as well. They are shocking.

For the first time since the poll began, support for L.G.B.T.Q. people has dropped, in all seven areas that the survey measured. They include “having an L.G.B.T. person at my place of worship” (24 percent of Americans are “very” or “somewhat” uncomfortable), seeing a same-sex couple holding hands (31 percent are uncomfortable) and “learning my child has an L.G.B.T. teacher at school” (37 percent are uncomfortable).

The increase in these numbers over years previous is not dramatic — 3 percent in some instances, two in others. What’s significant is not the margin of increase but the fact that the numbers are going up instead of down. In the life of this poll, that has never happened before.

The poll, now in its fourth year, shows that in many areas, the statistics measuring uncomfortability with L.G.B.T.Q. people are right back where they were in 2014, as if all the progress made during the second Obama administration never happened. And in the past year, the number of L.G.B.T.Q. people reporting discrimination on the basis of their sexuality or gender identity has jumped 11 percent — to 55 percent in 2017 from 44 percent in 2016.

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The reason for the change is not hard to discern. Since Day 1, Donald Trump and his administration have sent out the signal that division and prejudice are now the coins of the realm. Week by week, tweet by tweet, Mr. Trump has normalized all of our worst impulses — and the routine expression of homophobia and transphobia not least.

The list of disasters for the community in the past year is not short: Mr. Trump’s administration sided with the right to discriminate against L.G.B.T.Q. Americans in the Masterpiece Cake case before the Supreme Court; he declared a new policy removing L.G.B.T.Q. people from the 2020 census; he failed to even mention gay people on World AIDS Day; and he attempted (although so far has failed) to ban trans people from the military. And of course, he made Mike Pence his vice president, a man who, as a congressional candidate, endorsed conversion therapy and who, as governor of Indiana, defunded H.I.V./AIDs testing and prevention — an action that may well have led to a record outbreak of the disease in that state.

All of this comes in spite of Mr. Trump’s baloney during the campaign about what a great supporter he’d be of our community. “I will fight for you while Hillary brings in more people that will threaten your freedoms and beliefs,” he said. At one event he was even photographed holding a rainbow flag, although many observers noted that he was, symbolically enough, holding it upside down.

But the worst part of the past year — as the Harris Poll makes clear — may be less about Mr. Trump’s specific deeds, as bad as those are. The biggest damage may be the permission he has given for those with hate in their hearts to express it.

During my own coming out, back in 2002, I had feared the worst. And yet most of the things I dreaded did not, in fact, come to pass. I didn’t lose my job; I didn’t lose my family. But then, as a white person, the baked-in protection of privilege has shielded me from much of the violence and fear that is rife in my community.

Twenty-seven trans women were murdered in 2017, most of them of color.

When I think of my sister’s coming out, I also remember my Republican father, who had friends both gay and straight, even then. The night of that party, after he and I mixed up the punch, he looked on with amusement as my friends cavorted on the dance floor. The accordion trio was singing: “Everybody is a star; I can feel it when you shine on me. I love you for who you are, not the one you feel you need to be.”

My father has been gone for a long time now, but I carry him in my heart. I can still hear his voice, as he considered the words of that song. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” he said to me, wistfully, “if that were true.”

It would.

Jennifer Finney Boylan (@JennyBoylan), a contributing opinion writer, is a professor of English at Barnard College and the author of the novel “Long Black Veil.”